Blue Cross of California has decided to spend millions on dollars to lobby against health reform in California. In response, a group called "It's OUR Healthcare" has set up a website, which contains personal stories, a blog and some utube videos. The group states,

The state legislature is down to its final days of the session and
Blue Cross alerted their list of insurance agent supporters that
current reforms on the table are "unhealthy." (And the status quo
isn't?)

If you're sick of groups like Blue Cross standing in the way of
healthcare reform, then you'll love our new animated video released
today at www.SickOfBlueCross.com/BrightSide. We're asking Californians to watch the video and sign our petition and tell Blue Cross: "Don't stand in the way of reform!"

Very creative! In care you were not aware of what types of health care reform that are under consideration in California, if you visit the It's OUR Healthcare website, the right side of the page has a listing of recent articles detailing the California legislature's attempt at health care reform.

TalkLeft has a brief story on the acquittal of the Manganos, the New Orleans nursing home owners who had been charged with negligent homicide in the deaths of patients at their nursing home. The Washington Post provides some further background:

On Friday night, after four hours of deliberations, a jury acquitted
the Manganos of negligent homicide, charges that could have put them in
prison for life. The case raised broader questions about who, if
anyone, deserves to be punished for the deaths in Katrina's deadly
flooding.

Though numerous government agencies have been faulted
for the disaster, the Manganos were the first and only people to be
tried in a criminal court for any of the countless mistakes of planning
that led to 1,800 deaths in the flooding that followed the storm late
in the summer of 2005. . . . .

"I went back and forth for sure, but when it came down to it, the
Manganos were not criminals," the juror, Kim Maxwell, 46, a secretary
at a power plant, said later. "I just wanted to hug them." . . .

By all accounts, the Manganos' nursing home offered good care to its residents before the storm.

Mabel,
the administrator, sometimes helped bathe and dress the residents; Sal,
in charge of maintenance, stopped to spoon-feed those who could not
feed themselves. Their son and daughter-in-law helped out.

Having been through Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the Manganos also believed
that their nursing home had been built on a high spot and was less
vulnerable to flooding.

The
Manganos' fears for residents' safety during an evacuation were
well-founded, too, according to expert witnesses who testified that
nursing homes often suffer fatalities when evacuated.

The trial has been fraught with tears and bitterness, and the relatives of the dead and the Manganos have relived the tragedy.

"They killed 35 people," Joy Lewis, whose mother died in the flooding,
said after closing arguments. She added that while she does not
necessarily think the Manganos should go to jail, "they should pay" and
the specific form would be up to God. "When they put their heads on
their pillow at night," she said, "they'll pay."

The Washington Post reported on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed some interesting research on myths surrounding the flu vaccine and how pervasive they are. The Post states,

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It
recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or
"false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The
side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu
vaccine."

When University of Michigan
social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier,
however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28
percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they
remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did
better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older
people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages
now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The
psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been
confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have
broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to
myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate
information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and
clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically
contribute to the resiliency of popular myths. . . .

Research on the difficulty of debunking myths has not
been specifically tested on beliefs about Sept. 11 conspiracies or the
Iraq war. But because the experiments illuminate basic properties of
the human mind, psychologists such as Schwarz say the same phenomenon
is probably implicated in the spread and persistence of a variety of
political and social myths.

The research does not absolve those
who are responsible for promoting myths in the first place. What the
psychological studies highlight, however, is the potential paradox in
trying to fight bad information with good information.

Schwarz's
study was published this year in the journal Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, but the roots of the research go back decades. As
early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton Lepkin found that
the more often people heard false wartime rumors, the more likely they
were to believe them. The research is painting a broad new
understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional
notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the
studies show that the brain uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can
bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever
manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.

The experiments
also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still
believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct
information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories
matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are
the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false
information is true.

The experiments do not show that denials are
completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the
myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those
who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are
only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and
effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

The research also
highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted
in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently
require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can
paradoxically reinforce it. Indeed, repetition seems to be a key
culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in
memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that
easily recalled things are true.

Many easily remembered things,
in fact, such as one's birthday or a pet's name, are indeed true. But
someone trying to manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this
aspect of brain functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that
whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage
over everyone who denies it later. . . .

HOSPITAL ERROR....Two large studies, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
found that cutting the grueling work hours of doctors-in-training had
little effect on reducing hospital errors and patient deaths.
Surprised? So were the researchers who did the studies.

There are three possible explanations. One, most errors aren't
caused by groggy, sleep-deprived, over-worked residents, so giving them
more time off won't make any difference in the error rate. Two, the new
regulations, which cut residents' typical workweek from 100 hours to
80, didn't reduce their hours enough to make a difference. I mean
c'mon, 80 hours a week still doesn't leave much time for eating and
sleeping and all those romantic couplings we see on television shows
like "ER" and "Gray's Anatomy." Or, three, the number of mistakes made
in hospitals is so large, any drop in the errors committed by residents
was too small to be measured.

My vote goes to . . . well, let me just offer a couple of statistics. In its seminal 1999 report on the subject, To Err is Human,
the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as 98,000 American
patients are killed each year by medical error. Hospitals are such
complicated places, the ways that care givers can screw up are almost
too numerous to count. A doctor can accidentally perforate a patient's
colon during a colonoscopy, leading to infection. Surgeons leave
devices or sponges inside wounds and stitch patients up. One intensive
care unit that tracked near misses reported 1.7 errors per day per patient, about 30 percent of which could have been serious or fatal. . . . .

The two studies published today suggest why that might be the case.
The studies included 318,000 veterans who were cared for at Veterans
Administration Hospitals and another 8.5 million Medicare recipients.
It turns out, error rates did go down at VA hospitals, but not at the
other hospitals in the study.

When it comes to reducing medical error, the VA health system has
three things going for it that most other hospitals don't have. Numero
uno, every VA hospital has a fully-functioning electronic medical
records system.

This system not only helps physicians and nurses avoid many kinds of
errors, like giving a patient the wrong drug, it also allows each
hospital to track the treatment of every patient. Hospital safety
officers can easily give physicians and nurses feedback on how they're
doing when they implement any sort of error-reduction program. Other
hospitals are left flailing along, hoping that they are making a dent
when they initiate some new plan. VA doctors know -- and in real time.

And finally, VA hospitals do a better job of coordinating all the
different people who have a hand in a patient's care. Veterans don't
tend to fall through the cracks during hand-offs between one shift and
the next, for instance. That's why my colleague Phil Longman's book
about the Veterans Health Administration is titled Best Care Anywhere.
It's also why a Democratic presidential candidate will probably be
pointing to the VA in a speech later this month as one model for
improving American health care.

Science News Online reports on great news about the future development of a multiple sclerosis vaccine,

An experimental vaccine for people who have multiple sclerosis has
proved safe, clearing a necessary first hurdle toward regulatory
approval. The results of this initial trial also suggest that the
vaccine can indeed quell the self-destructive immune reaction that many
scientists believe causes the disease.

Despite this early promise, the researchers caution that the
findings are based on data gathered from a small group over a limited
time. The researchers used a technique called DNA vaccination, which
introduces a gene into the body to elicit an immune response. But
rather than rile the immune system against a foreign foe, the new
multiple sclerosis (MS) vaccine seeks to induce immune tolerance of
myelin basic protein, a component of myelin. A fatty material that
protects nerves, myelin is degraded in MS, robbing patients of muscle
control.

For the vaccine, researchers at Stanford University and Bayhill
Therapeutics in Palo Alto, Calif., designed a DNA ring that encodes a
slightly altered version of myelin basic protein. The changes replaced
immune-stimulating parts of the protein with immune-suppressing ones. Scientists gave 30 MS patients four injections over 9 weeks and
then tracked their progress for a year. The study was made public this
week and will appear in the October Archives of Neurology. Periodic magnetic resonance imaging of the patients' brains
showed that inflammation associated with the nerve damage of MS didn't
worsen as a result of the vaccine. . . . .

"This is an important development in the field of MS therapy,"
says immunologist Gérald J. Prud'homme of the University of Toronto,
who wasn't part of the study team. "This is the first demonstration of
a beneficial effect of DNA vaccination in a clinical trial of
autoimmune disease." The vaccine may inhibit myelin damage in several ways, Bar-Or
says. For example, the vaccine's DNA apparently enters the nuclei of
dendritic cells and other traffic cops that orchestrate immune
reactions, he says. Because of the DNA's tweaked structure, the myelin
basic protein that these cells then produce isn't seen as an enemy, and
other immune cells decrease their responses against it. . . .

Meanwhile, the findings have cleared the way for a larger trial
designed to assess whether the therapeutic vaccine can limit the nerve
damage that marks MS. In that study, researchers have already given 290
patients a longer course of the vaccine than the safety study entailed.
The team expects to release the results of the current study within the
next year.

McClatchy News reports on the latest and very exciting, developments resulting from the Human Genome Project

Four years ago, scientists triumphantly announced that they’d
finished reading the entire human genome — the 3 billion "letters" of
DNA that are the instruction manual for making a person. Trouble was, they didn’t know how to make sense of the bewildering
clutter of A's, C’s, G’s and T’s in the so-called "book of life." Now
the genome project is beginning to bear fruit. A bumper crop of fresh
discoveries connects specific bits of DNA to numerous diseases,
including cancer, diabetes, blindness and AIDS.

New
findings are being published almost weekly in scientific journals.
Scientists say they're important steps toward future treatments or
cures. "A whole series of studies is coming down the pike," Teri
Manolio, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute
in Bethesda, Md., told a genome conference in Boston this summer. "This
is an unprecedented opportunity to apply genetics to disease."

The
latest discovery is a report published in the journal Nature on Sunday
declaring that two tiny changes in human DNA may add more than an inch
to an individual’s height. An Aug. 2 paper in The New England
Journal of Medicine identified other DNA variants that may predispose a
person to a heart attack. Armed with such knowledge, doctors can
recommend changes in lifestyle, such as losing weight and stopping
smoking, that could save a patient’s life. . . .

The detection of a DNA variant related to a disease doesn’t mean
that a cure is just around the corner. Some variants raise the risk of
disease only slightly, and multiple genes are usually involved in
complex diseases. The variant itself may not be to blame, but it shows
the location along a strand of DNA where the trouble lies, helping
researchers find the culprit. . . .